The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The duties of friends were analogous to the duties of true counsel: telling the truth and constancy;
virtues which were at once public and private. Constancy in friendship - or more evidently, its loss
and betrayal - was a pervasive theme in the lives and writings of those who served at Henry VIII's
court. At the Christmas festivities at Greenwich in 1524 a captain and fifteen gentlemen offered to
defend Castle Loyal and its attendant ladies against all comers. Among the defenders were the poet
Thomas Wyatt, and with him Francis Bryan, whom Henry called his 'Vicar of Hell', and John Poyntz,
both of whom inspired Wyatt's mordant reflections upon the courtier's life. They shared the Renaissance conception of an ideal courtier who told his prince the truth, but their own experience
was of the mendacity and malignity of life at court. People were reading Castiglione's The Courtier -
in April 1530 Edmund Bonner reminded Thomas Cromwell of his promise to lend him Il Cortegiano
and make him a good Italian - but it was harder to learn its lessons. Flattery - feigned friendship -
was the enemy of both friendship and true counsel, and the besetting sin of courts. 'One unhappy
thing is in the court', wrote Bryan: many who will doff their cap to you 'gladly would see your head
off by the shoulders.' Flattery posed the greatest danger to monarchy, for only honest counsel preserved it from descending towards tyranny. Yet at court plain speaking was rare. Courts always
had a dark reputation for intrigue and danger: the collective noun for courtiers was a 'threat'.
'Your ladyship knoweth,' wrote John Husee to Lady Lisle in July 1537, 'the court is full of pride,
envy, indignation, and mocking, scorning and derision.' Cardinal Pole, Henry's cousin, asked:
'Who will tell the prince his fault? And if one such be found, where is the prince that will hear him?'
The normal way at courts, so Wyatt told his friend Poyntz, was to call the crow a swan, and the lion
a coward; to praise flattery as eloquence and cruelty as justice. Many at Henry's court were masters
of these silken arts. 'I played the jolly courtier, faith,' Thomas Wriothesley told his friend Wyatt, whom
he would betray.
In 1519 Henry declared that 'for our pleasure . . . one we will favour now and another such time as we
shall like'. That fluctuating royal pleasure invited competition. The King boasted that he could tell
his good servants from flatterers, but he deceived himself in this as in much else. With time he grew
restless, insecure, capricious and, captive in the court he had created, he could be played upon by
the men he had advanced and had constantly about him. The contradictory nature of this king, the unstill centre around whom everything at court turned, had consequences for its life. Any king might
be susceptible to persuasion, but Henry became exceptionally so. 'King Henry, according as his counsel was about him, so was he led,' wrote John Foxe, the Church historian and martyrologist,
and he had spoken to those who knew. Men and women had always come to the royal household,
and still did, to further the interests of their family and kin. The court was not a male preserve, save
in its heart, the Privy Chamber, for women of high birth and high ambition came also, seeking more
or less the same things: influence, connection and the advancement of their kin. They, too, were 
drawn into the plots and counter-plots which became characteristic of life there. Family honour and
advancement remained at the centre of the competitiveness at court, but where once no principle
more abstract than 'good governance' had been adduced, times were changing.
To guide the king was the part of a loyal counsellor, but to challenge the royal will, or to seek to
subvert or overrule it, was conspiracy and treason. This was the problem for those in the court who
opposed royal policy; they must work by devious means. In such political circumstances faction
flourished. In England, as in ancient Rome, faction had malign connotations: the enemies of a group
would call it a faction while those within it thought in terms of friendship. What factions sought
was the ear of the king and thereby his favour; to persuade him to one course or another, or to give
patronage to their clients. They waited for an occasion to insinuate themselves or to oust their rivals.
In the personal polity of the court factions, too, were personal. Fleeting, welded together more by
promise of mutual service than by unity of principle, they lasted only so long as friendship and common interest lasted.
Away from the court, in the country, there were suspicions that the King was a prisoner of its tiny
world. In 1536 the vicar of Eastbourne, walking in his churchyard, declared, 'They that rule about
the King make him great banquets and give him sweet wines and make him drunk, and then they bring
him bills and he putteth his sign to them.' In these ways his subjects were pleased to explain changes
they hated. But they were wrong. This was a king who was determined too rule. Princes cannot err,
of course, and Henry's vaunting self-righteousness always led him to blame others for events for
which he was responsible, or might have prevented. He knew what he wanted, if not always how to
get it, and was seldom thwarted. Although the King was often kept in the dark, and often deceived,
the truth could not be kept from him indefinitely, and, once he knew it, he would act. He came to understand well enough that perpetual intrigue surrounded him and that his counsellors and courtiers
maligned their rivals. If, and when, he chose, he could protect the vulnerable and those who had been
sequestered from his presence. In 1543 he rescued Archbishop Cranmer from the best-laid schemes
of Bishop Gardiner, warning Cranmer that, if he were once in prison, his enemies would procure false
witnesses against him. But by that time the nature of court politics had been fundamentally transformed.
In November 1527 ambassadors from France had been entertained at court by a Latin play. The dramatis personae included Religion, the Church and Truth, dressed as religious novices; Heresy,
False Interpretation and Corruption of Scripture appeared as ladies of Bohemia. Players took the
parts of the 'heretic Luther' and his forbidden wife (a former priest, he had married a former nun).
The play's main theme was of the Cardinal rescuing the Pope from captivity, saving the Church from
falling, and defending orthodoxy from heresy. This was almost the last time that so Catholic an interlude could be played to general approbation, for the new religion had invaded the court and had
profoundly changed life there. Now men and women might contend, not for power alone, but for a
cause. Also in November a yeoman usher of the court did penance for heresy. But there was now another at court, more influential by far than any yeoman usher, who had been touched by evangelical
reform, and whose power over the King was unrivalled: Anne Boleyn.
Anne had returned early in 1522 from long years away at the most glittering courts of Europe, a
grand court lady. She arrived at Henry VIII's court to become maid-of-honour to Queen Catherine,
and to break hearts. Anne had charm, style and wit, and a will and savagery which made her a match
for this king. In her music book, sent to please her, there was an illustration of a falcon pecking at
a pomegranate. The falcon was Anne's badge; the pomegranate of Granada, Catherine's. The pomegranate was itself the symbol of a fecundity which had brought Catherine many children, but
no living prince. By Easter 1527 the King was imploring Anne to become his mistress (as her sister
Mary had been), but she consented only to be his queen. In an illuminated book of hours Henry
scrawled, below an image of Christ as Man of Sorrows:

                                                                                I am yours
                                                                              Henry R forever.

And Anne replied:

                                                          By daily proof you shall me find
                                                          To be to you both loving and kind.

With evident promise, she wrote this under a picture of Archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin
that she would bear a son. Neither promise was fulfilled, but from 1527 Anne's influence over the
infatuated King seemed secure. Her enemies became the King's enemies; her friends, his friends.
The reign of Henry VIII, like that of Solomon, had begun well. An exquisite portrait miniature drawn
by Holbein in about 1534 depicted Henry as Solomon, receiving th homage of the Queen of Sheba,
representing the Church of England. Above the throne was the text: 'Blessed by the Lord thy God,
who delighted in thee, to set thee upon His throne, to be king elected by the Lord thy God.' Henry delighted to see himself as a godly prince, and to compare himself with Solomon in his justice and wisdom. He forgot that Solomon's reign degenerated, but soon he was reminded, when his own reign did also. Erasmus had written in his The Education of a Christian Prince, 'these expressions of a tyrant ''Such is my will'', ''This is my bidding'' . . . should be far removed from the mind of the prince'.
Wolsey remembered kneeling before the King in his Privy Chamber for hours at a time, trying to
'persuade him from his will and appetite', but rather than abandon any part of it Henry 'will put one
half of his realm in danger'. This was a king with the power and will to advance his private conscience
as a principle to bind not only the bodies but the souls of his subjects, and to set that private conscience against the whole of Christendom.